Witchborn
by D. M. Domini
Summary: I was born in the Witchstorm that cleansed the taint from the Blood. One moment, I was warm and growing in my mother's womb--the next, laying on the floor, suffocating and tangled in my own placenta and an empty pearl-laden dress.
1. Chapter 1

_Witchborn_

By D. M. Domini

_This world is not mine; it belongs to Anne Bishop. I am, like always, just playing with my super-duper-cool Black Jewels Trilogy action figures!_

#

I was born in the Witchstorm. One moment, warm and growing in my mother's womb--the next, laying on the floor, suffocating and tangled in my own placenta and an empty pearl-laden dress.

A warlord with a Tiger Eye jewel staggered into the room, shaking so bad he could hardly walk, or so I was later told. He almost stepped on me. He didn't. Maybe I cried out, or maybe he heard a tiny whimper on the white--who knew? He freed me of my placenta so I could breathe, and, clutching me to his chest, stumbled through the house, looking for survivors.

#

The orphanage I grew up in was not...unkind. Those who would be unkind to children on purpose had been scoured away, like my mother. Or perhaps she imploded--_something_ protected me. After all, out of all the thousands of Blood living when that Dark culling occurred, more than _one_ had to be pregnant during the Witchstorm, and more than _one_ had to be near enough to term that the child survived, if the Witchstorm was capable of discerning that the life of an innocent was so tightly entwined with the witch it was destroying. Or perhaps it made no discernment; maybe when facing the judgment of the Abyss, my mother did one selfless thing in her life and used herself up in protecting me.

Or...maybe I used _her_. We can be a savage people, no matter which race we're from.

In any case, like those babies and children that had already been outside the womb for some time, I grew up in an orphanage in Terreille. The orphanage was crowded. Even when witches and warlords came from Kaeleer, cooing and clucking over the little Blood orphans, there were always more children to replace them. The Witchstorm hadn't killed most children, but it killed many adults that had been their caretakers, and after that in the wake of the landen uprisings many of those capable adults who were left died too. I was not treated unkindly by those who ran the orphanage, but I was hungry, because there was little food anywhere in the Territory and I was smaller than all the other orphans and less able to fight for it once I was toddling and able to walk, and due to my generally low-key and phlegmatic nature I was later left to tend and care and raise myself because it was perceived that I _could, _and many others _couldn't_ or at least yelled loudly enough to make everyone feel sad for them. So I kept to myself, accepted what they had to give, and left it at that.

One thing they did try to give to me: They told me my origins as truthfully as they dared, which is how I knew the circumstances of my "birth"...and if they never named the aristo household I'd come from, it was because it had been looted and nothing was left, or the legacy of my bloodline was so foul that the best gift they could give to me was a fresh start, even if that meant I never knew my mother's or father's names. A couple of boys and girls early on, those in adolescence, over-wrought that they'd lost _everyone_--even if those people were ones most of those left alive considered better off gone--had died to already-stressed Warlord Princes when they'd shrilly tried to claim their inheritances and had their fearful belligerence mistaken for true threat. So it wasn't a misplaced fear...even if by the time I was old enough to attempt to challenge anyone, the immediate threat and tension everyone had felt was more or less eased...depending which Territory one lived in.

#

The orphans were a separate thing from the orphanage. I make these types of distinctions, because I find that those who don't are those who make poor judgments that spill over onto others. And that's not the type of person I wish to be.

They--the orphans--found out I was afraid of drains when I was five or six years old. There was a new caretaker, a Healer with a Sapphire jewel. It was the darkest jewel any of us had ever seen.

The day went fairly normally, with breakfast and classes, lunch and romping. Of course, after the romping, we were all dirty, so a large tub was filled and heated with hearth Craft, and one by one we were lifted by the waist by one or other of the caretakers, and commanded to scrub and wash. After we had washed, we stood up in the tub, were examined for any remaining dirt or grime, then lifted out and clothed. I had found my way into an extraordinary amount of mud that day, so I was one of the last out--so much so that before the Sapphire Healer lifted me out, she pulled the plug in the bath to let some dirt drain away so she could get a better look at any dirt on me that might remain.

Then she grabbed me by the armpits and lifted me out.

I screamed.

I screamed, and I screamed. And by the Darkness! I screamed. I could smell her psychic sent all around me, darker than anything I'd ever encountered, and adult. I could see the drain, swirling, swirling, down and down, away into Hell for all I knew. And I could feel my mind, slipping. Slipping like it had never set quite right. Like it was swirling down, and down and down like the drain--

_SLAP!_ My head jerked back, stopping my piercing screams.

_SLAP!_ My head jerked the other way, my other cheek stinging.

And the Sapphire Healer was nattering at me, telling how bad I was, how could I _do_ such a thing?

I had done something? I hadn't meant to! It was so unfair that I began to blubber, telling everyone that it was the _drain_, the _drain _was going to suck me away, and I hadn't _done_ anything! So how could I stop doing it?

And _that_ caused the laugher by the other orphans swaddled in towels and warming Craft. Oh no! The drain! The draaaaiiinnnn was going to eat me, it was going to suck me down! Oh boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo!

She slapped a few of them around too to stop them from mocking--she was awfully slappy for a Healer--then asked if I was bleeding. Still in tears, I gave a wobbly "No," and hid myself in the towel.

She asked me again if I were hurt, as if to make sure again there was nothing that she could apply the talents of her caste to.

I felt like the room was still spinning around me, and couldn't help the slight sobs that still shook my thin shoulders--partly due to the spinning, partly due to the cruelty of the other orphans. She ruffled my damp hair and muttered something about Black Widows that shut me right up, because I wasn't sure if it was a threat or not.

#

See, the orphanage wasn't really at fault. I was small, and I was having unexplained hysterics, of the monster-in-the-closet variety for all they knew. They even slapped around the other children a bit on my behalf. But the orphans, once they saw that sort of opening, they didn't let you forget about it. It didn't help that for at least another year and a half I had a terrible phobia about drains of any kind, which left me either semi-permanently grubby, or a chore-shirker as I couldn't face a sink-full of dirty dishes lest someone yank out the plug just to see me tremble as the water swirled around and around and around.

I grew out of it, the uncontrolled terror of drains at least, but by that time another hurdle was placed before me: my Birthright ceremony.

They told us what to expect, had us take some lessons from an absolutely elderly Priestess who looked like she'd crawled out from under an ancient mossy rock somewhere who explained that when it was time to take part in this ceremony, we would find out if we had the strength to wear a Birthright Jewel. Not everyone did. Some would only be able to wear a Jewel after the second ceremony, when they made their Offering to the Darkness and became adult.

We were told by some that you could never predict what Jewel someone would come away with. Others, however, said you could sort of, kind of, tell. Particularly with children as old as we were. Non-orphans had their Birthright ceremonies a few years earlier; I, for example, probably should have had my Birthright Jewel for at least a year by now.

Benign neglect.

After a few weeks of on and off again lessons from the elderly Priestess, we were questioned and tested again, and one by one, as impersonally as most other care was given in the orphanage, and like clockwork, taken away to an Altar to go through the ceremony.

This is where I managed to embarrass myself again. I stood before the doorway I was supposed to go through, waiting for the last child to come out. Finally they did--a young boy with golden skin and raven hair. He looked terribly disappointed, for he had no Jewel clutched in his hands.

Then it was my turn. I was anxious now, given that I'd witnessed one of the other orphans returning with no Jewel, and even as a child I knew what social standing Blood without Jewels had, but not overly so. The elderly Priestess came over, and motioned to me. She rested her hands on my shoulders, recited some instructions that I already knew, and gave me a blessing from the Darkness and Mother Night. And then she gave me a shove towards the door, opening it up with Craft as she did so.

My feet stuttered to a stop just before I crossed the threshold. There was a bit of whispering behind me, of jitters and how some children were braver than others. But I paid no attention to that.

I stared into the darkened room, into the Darkness, into the womb and bosom and Sanctuary of the Night...and I feared. I feared mindlessly, like I did the drains. I feared mindlessly, like a landen upon witnessing the most basic hearth Craft.

I tried to make myself go forward, to think about the way I'd be made fun of if I didn't even _try_ to complete the Ceremony, particularly since I was overage for it.

But I could feel the Abyss trying to suck me down. And I felt my mind shift again, until I almost felt like someone had placed a mirror perpendicular to my eyes, so one eye was looking towards one vista and its reflection, and the other eye towards another.

I couldn't. _I couldn't_. I was afraid. Of the dark. And the Dark. I couldn't move.

And so I didn't.

I didn't move.

I didn't go in. One of the Blood, afraid of Darkness.

They waited for me patiently; again, benign neglect. I didn't get hugs as often as I wanted them, or advice, or much of anything but the basic necessities, but they provided for me food, shelter, and some education, and were not willfully cruel.

I wonder sometimes what would have happened if they had talked to me, held me and reassured me, given me more time, or given me some special attention. They didn't.

But later I heard that they suspected that I, like the boy before me, would come away without Jewels. Even if in my case maybe it was just because I couldn't go through the door and complete the Ceremony.

Eventually I tore myself away, tear tracks down my face, and shook my head. I couldn't do it.

A week later, the elderly Priestess packed up and left, off to help another group of unwanted children obtain their Birthright Jewel, leaving all of us who had...and me and others, who hadn't, for various reasons...behind.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Chapter One--of many. It is an interesting challenge, for a writer, to set an engaging story in a world where all "evil" has been killed off, as it has been in Anne Bishop's Black Jewels world.

For you Pern fans--sorry for this not being a Pern fic, or even a Talent fic, or any fic set in one of Anne McCaffrey's worlds. I've been working on Skyboom, but it's slow. I've also recently A) Moved, B) Gotten a new job, and C) gotten a new boyfriend. Kind of knocked me off my writing stride for several months now!


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

All of that was a thousand years in the past.

But the past is what makes us, what forms us, what causes us to make the mistakes we make today. So it is relevant. Actions and experiences have consequences.

#

"Aristo!"

The Dhemlan warlord did not turn. He was an average man, of average height and build, and average features neither extraordinarily handsome or ugly. His skin was a murky intermediate brown, and his eyes were more dun than golden, although not an ugly shade of dun. Merely an average shade. There was no reason for anyone to call him "Aristo"; the fact that he was setting out his wares at a booth stated clearly that he was a Craftsman.

And to a witch or warlord of any sensitivity, it was probable that his Jewel wasn't particularly dark and his caste wasn't anything more than "Warlord", although he took no pains to make either clear to strangers. He certainly wasn't a Warlord Prince, able to ride the killing edge in an instant, and that's all anyone really needed or cared to know.

"Aristo!"

He ignored the call, instead reaching up to snag a portion of canvas that shaded his booth and tie it tighter. He had a suspicion it would rain, and he didn't like to Craft when there was a more mundane remedy available. It was tiring, when you had no Jewel to act as a reservoir of strength. So he'd come well-prepared, with canvases and ties and a warm woolen blanket for his legs.

The caller didn't ignore _him_, however. The owner of the voice strode right through the witches and warlords braving the mercurial fall weather to get some shopping done at the festival, and he planted himself in front of the booth, arms akimbo.

A Warlord Prince. A Warlord Prince with a head full of jaw-length wavy silver hair, and fair skin which, as a younger-lived race, probably put him at fifty years or so, with ten or thirty left to live. Or less, if his warrior-like attire was any omen for his eventual end. But still, a Warlord Prince. The psychic scent was already noticeable, mingling in the wooden poles of the booth with the psychic impressions of the hundreds of Blood that had passed him by over most of a thousand years and a thousand-times-four changings of the seasons.

Although...this psychic scent had a curious turn to it. As if the man were a...a W_hite-Jeweled_ Warlord Prince?

The Dhemlan Craftsman stared up into the cold blue eyes of the White-Jeweled Warlord Prince. Then he glanced down at the man's leather vest, and the leather pants, and the mace hanging at his hip, and at the knives and tools stored in little pockets, with only the horn-covered handles peeking out, and decided to say nary a word about it.

After all, _he_ didn't have any Jewels. Which made even White strength darker than his. So he spoke to the other male, modulating his baritone voice so that the inevitable thoughts about how this poor man got stuck with such an ineffectual class and Jewel combination did not sound in tenor or tone. After all--one thousand years had passed. And Blood society was once again learning how to deal with the truly malign. Although, not to the same extent as before...the Witchstorm. That _particular_ line of taint had been removed, root and stock. But it was possible--or, more possible than in an earlier age, at least--that this man had had been broken instead of born this way. There was no way to truly excise cruelty from the world, short of exterminating everyone, Blood and landen alike.

"May I help you, Prince?" he asked, wondering if using the man's title would be a mistake. You never knew, with Warlord Princes.

"Aristo," the Warlord Prince repeated.

He cocked a black eyebrow at the man, then turned his head left and right to survey his booth. "Were I an aristo, the extent of my domain is excruciatingly small," he said. "In _quantity_ at least. But I am a Craftsman, and I would say my _quality_ is perhaps of interest to an aristo...if that aristo were a little touched in the head and interested in buying up an entire booth filled with well-made variations and replications of the same article, in this case articulated _doorknobs_." To make his point, he reached to the right, and tugged on a brass lever, which opened a very small door set into a wooden box. There was a pleasant--to his Craftsman ears--oiled snick and the little door flashed its locking mechanism at the Warlord Prince. Then he shut it again, and repeated the gesture with another articulated doorknob, opening and closing small, mis-sized doors in wooden boxes again and again, the bronze and steel and tin flashing in the light of the dim little lantern he had set up in back to combat the dreary overcast day. "Do you need an articulated doorknob?"

The Warlord Prince ignored the display of wares with a disinterest that could have been interpreted as insulting, had the Dhemlan Craftsman borne any illusions about the allure of his particular type of wares. "You are Aryanloyd Witchborn?"

The pleasantly neutral expression on the Dhemlan Craftsman's face turned to desperately neutral before deep-set emotion, in this case anger, filled his dun-colored eyes. "I _was_ called that for a mere twenty years in the foolhardy days of my youth. I have been a Craftsman, _by comparison_, for _nine hundred years_--"

"Making doorknobs?"

"YES! MAKING DOORKNOBS!" Aryanloyd roared as he shot to his feet, working himself up into a fine fiery rage. Who was this man, Warlord Prince or not, to saunter up to him while he was minding his own business, and--

"That must be extraordinarily boring."

A few witches tittered off to the side, their attention caught by the emotion, no doubt fascinated by the melodramatic display going on between the two males. Particularly since one only wore White, and the other nothing at all; the encounter held all the drama of the theater, with no fear that any really harmful Craft would get used as tempers rose.

_ Bitches._

But his own snide thought knocked him off the edge of his temper, and with chagrin, he realized this Warlord Prince had gotten the best of him without even trying. Had nobody known better, they would have thought _he_ was the Warlord Prince--and a childish one at that. Color flooding his sallow cheeks, he bent to retrieve the woolen blanket that had fallen off of his lap and into the dirt under the stall. "Yes and no. It's something of a challenge to make doorknobs and locks that can withstand your average thief." He brushed at some stubborn chaff that had attached itself to his blanket, blew at it ineffectively when brushing didn't work, then finally used a whisper of barely-there Craft to work free the debris.

"My name is Ruber Lariat."

"I see. Do you need a doorknob, Ruber Lariat?"

"No," the man said, and the peculiar feeling of a white aural shield going up made their ears pop. "I need a witchborn."

Aryanloyd did not miss the wording. "'A'?" he asked. "_One_ Witchborn, as if there's more?" He had once, in his foolhardy youth, gone looking for others. It had not turned out well.

"Well," Ruber Lariat, White-Jeweled Warlord Prince, said. "You and I make _two_."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

"You really enjoy steak, don't you?" Ruber Lariat asked, as Aryanloyd took to his meal at one of the most expensive restaurants in the city with practically lip-smacking gusto.

"I do when I'm not the one paying for it," Aryanloyd said, giving the White jeweled Warlord Prince a level look, even as he neatly severed a bit from the larger portion with the exceptionally sharp steak knife he'd been given to use with the meal. "And, the time I spend listening to whatever you decided to track me down to say is time I'm _not_ spending selling articulated doorknobs." He popped the slightly-pink morsel into his mouth and chewed.

"Will you _shut up_ about the articulated doorknobs?" Ruber Lariat growled, his blue eyes turning as frosty as his manner. In fact, if you took everything together-his white hair, pale eyes, and light-colored Jewel, he resembled something out a story. A winter barbarian or warrior, just past his prime. The perpetual underdog in a world where Darkness was strength.

"Perhaps I will if you can explain to me how a member of one of the shorter-lived races can claim to be a Witchborn with straight face, and _without_ being a Guardian."

The frost in Ruber's eyes thawed a bit-or the man just put his temper under rein. Instead of answering right away, he took his wineglass and refilled it from the bottle. Then he swirled the burgundy liquid around, forming a miniature vortex in the middle of the glass.

Aryanloyd averted his eyes. Even a thousand years later, such movements still awoke a deep-seated phobia no Healer or Black Widow had been able to fix.

"Makes you want to vomit, doesn't it?"

"I'd have issues with the kind of man I was if mere eye and hair color combined with a lengthy life moved me to nausea. But an open mind doesn't change the typical life span of your people."

"No, no, no. No. The motion. Of the wine. Do you see?"

"I'd rather not," he excused himself. He doubted the steak would be as tasty coming back up.

"Exactly!"

Aryanloyd raised an eyebrow.

"When one of the Blood...one of the strongest, darkest, most primal of our kind...dives to collect her power, a vortex, much like this one, is formed."

Aryanloyd frowned. "And this you know...from experience?" He couldn't help but chuckle at that.

"Of course not," Ruber scoffed. "I wear the White. Any gathering of power I might do makes at most the dimple of a raindrop into the ocean. I went to the Library at Ebon Askavi and studied."

"The improbabilities here keep getting higher and higher," Aryanloyd said. "Who are _you_ that they'd _let_ you in?"

"The same as anybody; one who went in search of knowledge. They respect that. And they respect anyone who doesn't wet their pants upon encountering the psychic scents of those who, if not make that place their home, visit it often." Ruber gave him a sardonic smile. "Tiger Eye, Summer Sky, Sapphire, Ebon Grey, Black-it's all the same to me. I put in a petition, and they chose to grant me access to the Libraries long enough to do some research."

"Let's pretend I believe this tale too, _and_ that I believe they'd give you unfettered access to _accurate_ information. Because Darkness forbid that any of us have ever hidden or obscured important knowledge from our fellows," he said somewhat sarcastically, referring to the campaign of ignorance and misinformation that Dorothea and her regimen had strewn across the realm of Terrielle. The damage had not been undone yet...and perhaps never would be. "What connection between the whirling of your wine and the effect of a dark Jeweled witch or warlord are you trying to make?"

"We, those of us who were exposed to the culling, and the vortex, during our birth...are still ensnared by it. The side effects that we experience when viewing an analogue of it-the whirling of my wine, as you said-is a symptom of that. It crosses something in our heads, in our minds; it makes us aware of the turmoil that still exists within us, that has existed within us our entire lives."

"And how does this explain your purported unusually long life-span?" For if he believed Ruber Lariat, the man was actually his own age, everything else aside.

Ruber let out a breath. "Exactly how, I do not know, although I have my theories."

He had to admit-what this aggressive White Jeweled Warlord Prince had said was interesting. At the very least, a different take from his own theories about the circumstances of his birth-either the ones he'd had when very young, or the ones he had now. "So why did you track _me_ down...without even the courtesy of buying one of my articulated doorknobs?" he asked.

"I _did_ buy you dinner!" the other man protested, gesturing at the steak Aryanloyd was devouring.

"A net loss; the sale of one doorknob could buy me three dinners."

"Three dinners _here_? What, are they inlaid with cut Jewels? _Mother Night_ you are unbelievable!"

"Perhaps. So why are you here?"

"I'm here because I believe your life may be in danger."

Aryanloyd chewed and swallowed the last bit of steak, drained his own glass of wine, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "That's very...thoughtful of you."

"Well, I walk close to the Twisted Kingdom, sometimes," Ruber Lariat said.

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Apologies for the delay in updates. Both to you...and to myself. This is an awfully fun fic to write. One real note, though...generally speaking, if I state something that runs counter to BJT canon, it's usually a conscious choice to tweak something for the purposes of my story. I realize it's hard to prove that there never was a contradiction with Ruber's race and age, given the comment about it occurred before this chapter went up, but I really did plan it. ;) Trust me!


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Himier Crael abruptly chose to sit in the dust at the side of the road when his searching eyes spotted the distant line that marked the wall of the city. Or at least, that's what he told himself. He might be half-landen, and...probably without caste...but he did have his pride. And his pride said...he was tired. So he'd sit. Right now. It had nothing to do with the fear and dread that coiled in his gut; he was merely tired.

After all, if the mule were cast out by the donkeys, why ever would he think the fine horses would take him in?

Dustell had. If you could say a hare he could occasionally hear in his thoughts could take him in when the humans around him rejected him. But Dustell had, and had continued to be there for him, even when the village began to murmur about how Mier was extending the lop-eared rabbits life with Craft, and how selfish that was when the village had someone perish due to age or illness or injury every few years. And yet he kept a _bunny_ alive and hopping? Truly, the Blood were corrupted by their powers.

_You need to go to the city,_ the rabbit had told him one evening when Mier had found him in a garden, munching someone's greens contentedly.

_There's spiders in your fur,_ Mier had said, and tried to pick them and their webs off of Dustell's long grey ears.

Dustell knocked his hand away, with Craft. _They do no harm. They have their own wisdom, strange as it may be._

The next morning, Mier had found Dustell in the same garden, dead. Thousands of tiny spiders had covered his fur, so that he was crawling with the pinhead-sized progeny of some garden spider, being encased in strand after strand of spider silk. "I see a dead friend, but no wisdom," he'd told them bitterly, as if they might hear him as Dustell used to. But Dustell's typical terse advice still circled in his mind, as he headed home, still mourning in his heart. The city, out of the mountains, down in the fertile valley. The place where the dangerous Blood congregated, for there were no cities anywhere that were made and populated solely by landen.

Mier had packed that day.

Now, he studied the distant walls. He had found distances were deceptive here, out in the open on the broad, flat plains of the valley. In the mountains, if you saw it, you could probably reach it so long as there were no chasms in your path. Here, it could take days of travel. It was a little maddening at times.

Was he mad enough to continue? He thought about this for a while, chewing slowly through a rough sandwich he had made of hard bread and cheese and some greens he had found growing at the side of the road. He wasn't sure. Sometimes he suspected the definition of sanity was that you _could_ worry about being mad. Once you actually were mad, you no longer questioned it. In which case, he had spent most of his life mad, because after the fiftieth child came up to him and asked him if he really believed the rabbit could talk back or if he were crazy, he started to stop caring.

So once he had refreshed himself with food and some drink from the bottle he had, he got back on his feet, and resumed walking in, if not high hopes, at least something that wasn't outright terror and dread.

He discovered later, perhaps the terror and dread would have been the wiser option.

"Why are you entering?" a bored woman...perhaps even _witch_...asked him at the gate. He'd been listening to others, men and women who handed papers, or money, or spoke about family and trade, and hadn't thought any of that applied to him.

So he told her the truth. "Because I want to." He didn't have a loftier motive than that.

She blinked, and fixed him with a sharp golden-eyed gaze. "What?"

He hadn't thought his mountain accent was difficult to understand; after all, he understood hers just fine, and some of the folks that had entered the city by foot or cart before him had accents thicker than his. Still, he leaned forward and enunciated clearly. "Because. I want. To."

The woman exploded into laughter. "Well, I can't exactly put that on the papers, can I? Lookit this, we have a little Prince here-entering the city _because he wants to_."

Mier felt his face begin to turn red, and looked around himself only to see others were paying attention to him now.

One of the men waiting behind fixed him with sharp blue gaze that seemed to cut through him like ice, before becoming disinterested again. "No he's not a Prince. Of any sort."

The woman still chortled. "No, he's not," she agreed. "All right. No jewel, no caste. Now really, what's the reason you're here? Something that we can put on this paper so you won't look like a fool for the next hundred years."

Mier flushed again. Yet, even under her sudden sympathy-if calling him out one moment in front of strangers, then showing her motives were to save him later torment if she had listed that on what might possibly turn out to be a very important piece of paper later was sympathy-he couldn't come up with another reason that wasn't a lie. So he said, his tone somewhat bitter because he knew up front this one was silly, "To seek my fortune."

She made a sound, and ran her hand through her hair. He suddenly noticed a pendant between her breasts; in it glinted a blue Jewel. He stared at it, wondering if it were Summer Sky...or Sapphire. How did one tell?

"My face is up here, kid," she said.

He turned red again-which seemed to be quite a habit now-and glanced back up at her yellow eyes.

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen," he said, the lie practiced. Sixteen is what people believed, he had found.

She frowned. "That's below the age of Majority," she said.

Oh. He hadn't known. Did it make a difference? Perhaps he should say later that he had his Majority...whatever age that was. He couldn't be a child still, could he? Even among the longer-lived races?

"All right, I need to keep this line moving. You're here for study, then, if you're really that young. I thought you were just stupid, but maybe you're just a kid. So. Go find a school, sign up somewhere, take some admissions tests, get smart. And if you're lucky, that'll help you make your fortune." Then with a practiced hand, she filled out the rest of the papers...and laid some sort of Craft on them.

He almost felt his jaw drop. That it didn't was only because he expected to see someone other than himself and Dustell doing so, eventually...but it was still a shock, somehow. He reminded himself that he were still a mule, and even if he could now see what bits he shared with horses, the horses would only see the long ears and the bray of a donkey. So he thanked her, took his newly drafted papers-the one still buzzing with Craft under his fingertips-and shuffled through the gate.

Into the city.

_To seek my fortune,_ he told himself sarcastically.

Perhaps the woman...nay, witch, since he'd _seen_ her Craft!...was right. Perhaps he should find a school. Was it possible? Or was he too stupid or ignorant even for a school?

But before that, there was one other thing he wanted to find. Because the people from his village had spoken of them in reverent and scared tones from time to time.

He wanted to find a Warlock Prince.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Oh dear. I know I'm up too early when I try to upload a story called "Witchboom". Although I have to admit...a Pern/Black Jewels Trilogy crossover would rock in so many different ways. Aw man, now I want to write Robinton as a Sapphire Jeweled Prince. If I did that, who would I bring in? And what would they do in the Realms? I couldn't give the entire damn Hall Sapphire Jewels, no matter how symbolic it'd be. Ok, I just won't think about it. I don't need another plot bunny; just look at my list of fics for unfinished stuff. Someone want to take this plot bunny home before it starts making woobie eyes at me? Please?


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

Aryanloyd, once known as "Witchborn" in his years of youthful hubris, walked home with a full belly and a troubled mind. Ironically, it was less due to Ruber Lariat's melodramatic reveal of his impending doom, and more due to watching the red wine swirl around in the glass and hearing the man's theories on why the movement sickened the stomach to watch. (How had the Warlord Prince known about that, anyway?)

It had finally begun to rain a few blocks from his home, and he hunched his head down low as he mulled the man's theories over, as if the collar of his shirt might actually give him some shelter. Had he not carefully vanished his canvas tarps and blankets along with his wares, he might have put one over his head. But the rain wouldn't make him melt, like some (falsely) said it would to one of the demon-dead. So he endured it, watching runnels course down the gutters and away into the sewers, and thinking of drains and vortexes, and leaves and buds caught in a deluge.

Before he had come to any sort of real conclusion on how much of a crackpot the man might or might not be, he found himself at the little iron gate outside the home he rented a small suite of quarters in. As he reached over the gate to undo the latch, his finger parted a few strands of silk some enterprising spider had dropped in a poor location. He narrowed his eyes, and went through the gate and closed it behind him. And he paused and knelt down without his knee quite hitting the wet cobbles of the path and gently began to harvest tiny strands of silk from the doomed web, using a light breath of Craft.

Then he puttered around the front garden, identifying a few more webs from the raindrops glimmering on them, and did the same, apologizing under his breath to the spiders. A little golden one, the size of a poppy seed, scurried away to take shelter under a blood-red trumpet bloom.

Leaving the garden, he found himself humming as he unlocked the door and stepped inside the front entry. The spider silk he carried carefully twined around a thumb and forefinger, so with an unusual use of Craft-and precious power-he vanished his coat to prevent dripping all over the hall as he ascended the stairs to his quarters. His boots, however, he pried off with one hand and the help of the opposite foot, and left sprawled by the doorway under the row of mailboxes.

By the time he was inside his small abode, he'd started to add small "dah...dahDAH...dahs" to his humming, his spirits rising as he silently worked over his theories in light of the ones Ruber had espoused. They weren't quite coherent yet...and he didn't expect them to be for a while. But that was fine. The spider silk was just going to complicate things anyway.

Stopping in his kitchen, he momentarily paused to plug the sink, fill it up with water, and then unplug it. He forced himself to stare at the whirlpool that formed, as nausea began to make his stomach roil in budding turmoil. But the stark fear he remembered from the orphanage he'd grown up in didn't manifest. It actually hadn't very often in the past three hundred years; that was one symptom the Black Widow he'd visited had been able to fix.

Or suppress.

At the time, he'd felt a mental compulsion to _not feel fear_ over such a silly thing was a splended compromise, if it meant he could empty his bathwater without wanting to run screaming from the room. He didn't care if the lack of fear was natural or the product of a mind-tangling web.

But perhaps it was time to face that fear. If he could validate or invalidate Ruber Lariat's theories, even the price of failure and future days or decades of terrors over washing tubs and kitchen sinks until he found another Black Widow he trusted was worth it.

_ Everything has a price._


End file.
